Books in the Emotions In History series

While fear and anxiety have historically been associated with authoritarian regimes, Frank Biess demonstrates the ambivalent role of these emotions in the democratization of West Germany, where fears and anxieties about the country's catastrophic past and uncertain future both undermined democracy and stabilized the emerging Federal Republic.

Enthusiasm is desirable, yet dangerous. More than just affective intensity, it entails belief. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this book explores different styles of religious enthusiasm in Modern Germany, inflected by historical traditions and social milieus, in an effort to understand the modern ambivalence toward this feeling.

The Holy Roman Empire was the heartland of the witch craze, with around 23,000 witches executed in the early modern period. In this book, Laura Kounine uses case studies of witch trials in early modern Wurttemberg to examine how people sought to identify witches, and the ways in which ordinary men and women fought for their life to avoid the stake.

A book about the ways in which humans have been bound affectively to the material world in and over time; how they have made, commissioned, and used objects to facilitate their emotional lives; how they felt about their things; and the ways certain things from the past continue to make people feel today.

An exploration of the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul, Beyond Melancholy demonstrates the value of an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the emotional past.

Analyzing debates about emotions and urban change in Berlin and Cairo, Joseph Ben Prestel questions the assumed dissimilarity of the history of European and Middle Eastern cities in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Traces the history of the concepts of civility and civilization in nineteenth-century Europe and Asia and explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups.

The first cultural history of terms of emotion found in German, French, and English language encyclopaedias since the late seventeenth century.

This volume demonstrates how children, through their reading matter, were provided with learning tools to navigate their emotional lives, presenting this in the context of changing social, political, cultural, and gender agendas, the building of nations, subjects and citizens, and the forging of moral and religious values.